The Home review
A lukewarm mystery leads to unexpected and violent ends.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
The Home
Directed by James DeMonaco
Written by James DeMonaco and Adam Cantor
Starring Pete Davidson, John Glover, Bruce Altman, Ethan Phillips, Matthew Miniero, Marilee Talkington and David Moreland
The Home Review
Old folks’ homes are a hot setting in modern horror. Ok…that’s an overstatement. But we have seen it as the one-location setting for two recent releases. The Rule of Jenny Pen puts us in the viewpoint of an aging judge whose recuperation is sidetracked by a fellow resident. It’s powered by the performances of its two leads…and leaves the creepiness to the insane bully played by John Lithgow. The Home sets us inside a similar facility. This time, our lead character is much younger. As for the plot…well…we have a lot to get to.
Pete Davidson stars as Max…a troubled young man forced to do community service following his latest arrest. Things have been rough for Max since the death of his brother years earlier. Tasked with cleaning up (and helping out around) the home…Max tries to put his best foot forward. When he begins to notice strange things happening in the home, and his favorite resident unexpectedly dies, he takes an active role in trying to figure out what’s going on.
The residents in the home seem kind enough. The issues revolve around screams coming from the fourth floor…where Max isn’t allowed to go. He’s unable to sleep…having terrible nightmares every night. The people he works for seems to be hiding something…though we’re not going to get any closer to figuring out what it really is until we wander through two full acts of the story. He comes to believe that the residents are in danger…and the live in doctor with a history of strange experiments seems to be at the heart of it. After forming a real connection to one of the residents…she reluctantly tells him that he’s on the right track. That something is very wrong in the home.
The odds that you’ll figure out where The Home is going to end up are low. The mystery Max is trying to unravel doesn’t give you enough information to form a full theory…and then much of what we learn in the first two acts ends up being surprisingly unimportant by the end. This is the biggest issue facing The Home. It’s not very well paced…seems entirely unsure of itself…and wanders around for over an hour. What pieces of information we do learn along the way…very little of it ends up meaning anything. It can be a frustrating watch.
Then the third act comes, and everything is turned upside down. The slowly paced, largely meaningless first two acts are blown apart by a story turn so unexpected that it shakes the movie out of its slumber. Every aspect of the movie does a total 180. The tone changes, the pacing picks up considerably, it becomes a violent bit of pure vengeance…after it loses its mind completely. The climax of The Home is so wildly different (and more entertaining) than what comes before it that you have to stop and ask yourself if it was earned.
The answer is…kind of. There’s two ways to look at it. On the one hand, the third act of the movie flat out tells you that you’ve been wasting your time trying to figure things out to that point. It doesn’t give you enough information. It doesn’t even give you the right information. If you were frustrated with that first hour or so already…learning how much of it was ultimately unnecessary only doubles down on that feeling. On the other hand, the movie does explain itself and everything checks out in a basic narrative sense once all is revealed. It’s just completely insane. It’s also awesome.
Davidson plays the role completely straight. There isn’t a hint of comedy in the performance (or the script). He’s good…as are the ensemble of older actors that include John Glover, Bruce Altman and Ethan Phillips. Given how much time is seemingly wasted in the first two acts of The Home, however…maybe some comedic beats would have worked out better. If so much isn’t going to matter anyway…they could have gotten some mileage out of Davidson’s comedic timing. Instead, The Home is a fairly somber and meandering time until it flips a switch and rides itself off the rails in ways that I couldn’t predict.
The Home is a tale of two parts. A long part that is often a struggle to get through…investigating a mystery without nearly enough information and plenty of lies attached to what we can gather. And a much shorter second part that is, honestly, insane and worth the time it takes to get there. If more entertaining (or important) things had happened in the first part…The Home would have been a home run. Instead…it’s a double. Actually…it’s a movie that reaches second when an errant throw allows it to get there when it should have been thrown out at first. Against its own set odds…it somehow ends up in scoring position.
Scare Value
The first three quarters of The Home requires some effort to get through. It feels choppy…the pacing is off…the central mystery remains too undefined to fully invest in. It tries to skate by on the creepiness of being in an old folks’ home…which…mileage will vary on that. But the third act of The Home swings for the fences and is an unexpected, bloody delight. So little of what comes before it ends up not mattering that the whole ordeal can end up feeling frustrating, however.
2/5
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